The Swift Flight of a Sparrow

Thursday, 1 December 2016

As I read more about Basil Bunting for the critical portion
of my PhD, and in preparing my paper this coming Saturday (which is only
partially about Baz), I find myself getting irrationally-but-steadily-more-annoyed
by the following quote, which he made in an interview recorded in 1981 (ed.
Richard Swigg, re-quoted here from Don Share’s authoritative new Faber edition,
The Poems of Basil Bunting):

“What is called “Geordie” is a bastard
language, it’s a mixture mainly of south Northumbrian with the Irish that was
brought in by the labourers who came first to dig canals, then to build
railways, and finally settled down largely in the coal mines. So that a man
from Jarrow is speaking what has a double origin in Northumbrian and in
northern Irish.”

Are not all languages, and dialects, ‘bastard languages’
with, at least, dual origins? I understand and appreciate Bunting’s assertion
that Geordie is a kind of hybridised mix of multiple ‘old’ northern tongues,
forged both by necessity and serendipity in the mettle of the Industrial
Revolution, along the banks of one of its great commercial rivers (the Tyne),
but I detect a smug sense of superiority which seems to claim that a more authoritatively
(because older) Northern vernacular lies behind it.

Sure, parochialism in its rawest sense is probably at play
here: Basil Bunting was, as he was at pains to reiterate, a Northumberland man;
and I am not. Bunting was not fond of the county boundary changes in the 70s, which would lead to the formation of Tyne and Wear, the metropolitan
county borough which I have written and taken to be part of my address all of my life. And, yes, it’s
true: certain partisans of the old county system still refuse to write ‘Tyne
and Wear’ where ‘Durham’ or ‘Northumberland’ will do the job nicely
thankyouverymuch.

Part of me thinks that this is all bollocks anyway:
arbitrary borders, especially in as far as they are nearly always not real (certainly in the English
counties sense), are part of this problem we now have of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’
and ‘there’. They are ways and means of tricking us into pens; siloing our
concerns away and signifying them as ‘different’, when more often than not they
are ‘same’, or ‘similar’.

I’d still venture that most people outside of the region
(Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne and Wear and the Tees Valley – the North-East)
would still say – yes, simplistically, in too-broad-brush-strokes – that we all
speak Geordie. This is not accurate and belies the richness, variation and
tonal dexterity of the region’s many accents and dialects, but to John Smith
from Kent or Jane Doe from Shropshire, whether we’re from Berwick or Billingham,
we pretty much all – or might as well all – speak with what they perceive to be
Geordie accents.

Basil, then, is right to point out the complex ways in
which Geordie is an inheritance of Irish and Northumbrian; but I think he is
also wrong in that Geordie also influenced and shaped the Northumbrian accent
of today. If the Geordie accent ‘peaked’ during the Industrial Revolution,
sometime between the late-nineteenth and mid twentieth-centuries, and has been ‘receding’,
‘softening’ (or, as I prefer, ‘evolving’) since the late 1980s, then we must
also assume that its influence spread north and west, co-mingling and
co-habiting with more traditional, rural Northumbrian accents in towns like
Hexham, Morpeth and Alnwick.

Thanks in part to the surge in international broadcast
media, the general trend towards globalisation of goods, services and labour,
and the calculated and measured decline of the once-prodigious manufacturing
bases around the three (main) North-Eastern rivers (Tyne, Wear, Tees), the
North-East’s accents are undoubtedly not as strong as they were 30-plus years ago.
I notice this in the variation between my own accent and that of my parents and
grandparents, the latter of which would be termed the ‘broadest’.

In many ways this is common sense stuff; and I have
perhaps, in writing this, become as finicky as Bunting in highlighting the
whole issue. However, as somebody fiercely proud to be from South Tyneside,
born a kick in the pants from Jarrow, whose lineage traces directly back to
Irish labourers, and who ultimately draws his surname from that great
Scottish-Gaelic pool, I say: ‘Aye, it’s a propa bastad language, and aa bliddy
love it.’ I think the Geordie accent, which I am proud to retain a diluted
version of (but which I can and do ‘ramp up’, depending on company, excitement
and/or levels of alcohol consumed) is a beautiful thing and not mutually incompatible
with any of the various Northumbrian tongues. Listen to folk in Seashouses, for
instance: it sounds initially like something you’d hear in Shields or Whitley
Bay, but it’s quite different, and I think that’s a great thing!

Two things for the record: first – I am not a linguist;
second – I love Basil Bunting’s poetry dearly. The fact that Faber & Faber
have finally put out this edition is absolutely mint. But my God, he was some
boy of an antagonist when the occasion took him!

Thursday, 24 November 2016

Despite
doing a PhD in Newcastle, and writing about the North-East, I still live in
Chester, a place I have frequented now, with some interruptions, for over ten
years. In September 2006, as a plucky eighteen-year-old, I first came to this
city; then in 2010, at the end of the taught portion of my MA, I moved back to
South Shields, only to return to Chester for work in November 2013.

It is
now November 2016 and much – and little – has changed. I have occupied six rented
properties across two delineated periods: four as an undergraduate and MA
student; two as a working professional/PhD student-come-freelancer.

The
relationship you have to a place necessarily shifts and evolves. This is what I
have been thinking about a lot, 15 months into being a student enrolled in an
institution which I am regularly at (weekly, at present) but on paper (and not
just for administrative purposes) am routinely 180 miles away from.

I’m
meant to be writing a paper on Basil Bunting for a symposium at Durham
University’s Institute of Advanced Study on Saturday 3rd December.
The weird thing – probably the weirdest
thing – about going into doctoral study after having done a few years of ‘real’
work, is that you are largely your own boss, colleague(s), tea-making
facilities, photocopier, diarist and teller of bad jokes and jeerer-on in times
of challenge. You can ‘skive’ and nobody will know, except you, and you better
damn believe that the walk you took this afternoon had some justification in
your research. Oh, hang on, are you making a brew? Milk, no sugar, please.

This
has nothing to do with Basil Bunting, the paper I’m meant to be delivering or
the poems I’m meant to be writing. But… no, maybe it does.

‘Jake
Campbell is a writer who divides his time between Tyneside and Chester’, I have
just written in a poetry submission. ‘His practice-based research at Newcastle
University is an investigation into the nature and identity of belonging in
England’s North-East.’

Can we
‘un-belong’ just as much as we ‘be-long’? I have thought about this nearly
constantly for at least the last year. Those of you who know me outside of the
internet will no doubt have been bored by my frequent comparison of Newcastle
(Tyneside) to Liverpool (Merseyside). For the last 18 months, travelling
between Chester and East Boldon or Tyne Dock (on the Tyne and Wear Metro), I
have emerged from Gateshead/Birkenhead (how serendipitous that both places
carry the ‘head’ suffix?) and been startled by how very alike the two vistas are.
Honestly, take the Merseyrail twenty minutes out of Liverpool, on the Wirral
Line, heading south to Chester, and the view back across to the skyline of
Liverpool will be staggeringly similar to that which you will witness when
travelling out of Newcastle City Centre east through Gateshead towards South
Tyneside. Nominally, this is to do with how the train tracks skirt the two
rivers in a fortuitous mirror-like simulacra; but I think it is also a result
of the cultural, industrial and socio-topographic foundations that both places
are built upon.

I woke
up in the middle of the night last night and I had no idea where I was.

Poet
John Kinsella has a forthcoming book on Displacement. Polysituatedness, according to the pre-blurb on Manchester
University Press’s website, ‘extends
John Kinsella’s theory of ‘international regionalism’ and posits new ways of
reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and
the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the
person occupies place.’ The book is not due
until January next year, but I’m sure that Kinsella would recognise what I mean
when I speak about ‘be-longing’ (with hyphen) and ‘un-belonging’ in not
strictly binary ways. How much do I ‘long’ to ‘be’ in South Shields (or
Chester) and how much is my not being there (being elsewhere) a symptom of
(cause of) my un-belonging?

People
– rightly – direct scorn at the super-rich buying up spaces in our cities and
towns only to spend a fortnight of the year there while pricing out of the
market the local, indigenous communities, often young people. From the Lake District
to Vancouver to London, these issues have been prevalent for some time, and in
some places – like Vancouver, who have put a 15% tax on foreign investors – a sense
of civic appropriateness is beginning to take a stand.

Fleetingly
in Shields and Chester, but nearly always transitory, to what extent are my interactions
with these urban locales meaningful? I pay council tax to Cheshire West and
Chester council (though, probably, I should receive a discount as I am a
full-time registered student) and my rent currently goes to a landlord (whom,
of course, I’ve never met) in another part of the city, via an agency. I buy
food, beer, clothes and other things here: coffee, books, train tickets, but I
don’t know my neighbours, no contractual obligation other than the one for my
rented flat keeps me here, and I am lucky if I now speak meaningfully with or
to anybody in the city who isn’t my
partner. I don’t use the italics as a plea for compassion or understanding: I
merely do so to highlight the fact of my displacement; what it engenders and
how, nodding to Kinsella, place(s) inhabit a person, and a person inhabits a
place(s) even when they are not there.

Walking
around this place I can feel like a ghost. Severed from most economic commitments
originating in the vicinity (incoming and outgoing); not answerable to any
vocational authority in the city or region; and apparently-‘free’ to utilise
the space of the city to my will, I am able to drift through various past
edifices of the once-much-more-significant parts of my life.

This
is exactly what I did this afternoon, as the sun began to sink over the river
Dee. The Dee, rising in Snowdonia, north Wales, winds its way to the Irish Sea
via Chester, holding this border city in a cupped embrace before dispensing
itself into banked-up mud flats adjacent to, were it not for the Wirral Peninsula,
that other great river: the Mersey. From the 14th Century, Chester
was an important port city, linking the North-West to Ireland and the
continent. However, the Dee began to silt up in the 18th Century
(despite the excavation of the ‘New Cut’, effectively a straight channel to aid
navigability) concurrently affording Liverpool, and the wider Mersey
conurbations, the fortunes (quite literally) to expand. Chester, meanwhile,
became, well, less developed. To the credit of historic and geophysical
circumstance, the city the visitor sees today is advantaged principally because
of its declining naval, marine and dockside infrastructure. This city, arbitrarily
part of the North-West, feels so
different to Liverpool, Manchester and, yes, Newcastle. Principally and superficially,
that is because it is much smaller, but the knock-on effect of its not having
had a prolonged industrial satellite, connected to its core riverbank, has
meant that in contemporary terms, the city feels much more like present-day
York, or even Oxford, Shrewsbury or other cities in the Midlands and South. No
doubt the Shropshire Union canal stemmed the flow, so to speak, of the Dee’s
misfortune, connecting the city – via North and Mid-Wales – to Birmingham and
Manchester and forming vital trade links with two of the country’s hotbeds
during the Industrial Revolution; but this is a place, I feel, where the
identity of the body politic – insofar as it is comprised of myriad layers of
affected meaning – is missing something, and that something is a historic
manufacturing and nautical base.

On
a visit to post-industrial Tyneside, or to use that clumsy portmanteau ‘NewcastleGateshead’,
no doubt coined to ‘Coin’ the Blairiband New City (of New Labour), tourists may
peripherally be aware that they are at the nucleus of a once-thriving place of
industry, but they are likely more interested in, and steered towards, the new
consumer-based norms of the Pitcher and Piano wine bar, or the Malmaison Hotel,
or the Sage concert hall—all of them, and there are others, sites of spectacle
and consumption: of alcohol, music, leisure. There is a reason Newcastle is
such a magnet for Hen and Stag do’s: its watering holes are numerous, its
hotels are ample and reasonably-priced, and at the back of it all, one can
imagine oneself slaking the type of thirst that could only have been generated
hammering rivets onto ships as the hoarfrost hung over the filthy river and the
mercury plummeted below zero.

Needless
to say, taking a stroll even a mile or two to the west or east, the scars of industry
become much more stark, the money dries up and it – as Brexit has shown –
becomes clear that maybe the task of replacing monolithic industry with haphazard
service jobs hasn’t quite worked. I don’t wish to speak for much further west
of the Tyne than Dunston Staithes, itself an interesting vestige of the Tyne’s
prior might, but I do know the east of our beloved regional ‘capital’ very
intimately. Take the right-angled bend around the river, to where Wallsend is
in a staring match with Hebburn, and you will get an impression of what I mean.
Travel a few miles further, to the Port of Tyne (yes, to be fair, it’s doing
very well) it will become pretty evident that, while industry is still here to
some limited degree, the deliberate conversion of waterside activity from
production to consumption hasn’t at all been a balanced and smooth process. I
am from a time and place where all but the vestiges of this industry remain,
but even now, looking out over the mouth of the Tyne from the Lawe Top in South
Shields or from the High Light in North Shields, it is possible to feel connected
to the rhythms of work and commerce: where the Shields ferry carries commuters;
where the DFDS ferry carries holidaymakers; where ships carry Nissans for the
export market and coal and tea for further processing and distribution; and
where, more philosophically, the ocean meets the river, England meets Europe,
and in the intertidal and littoral zones, we become acutely aware of the ebb
and flow of all life.

But
we’re back in the North-East and I don’t think we were supposed to be. Are we?
My writings about Chester are conspicuous for their absence. Bearing in mind
that this place has dominated the majority of my adult life, it is strange that
I have written so little about it. I am curious about that. Does perspective –
distance – give meaning to place? Do we find symbolism, pattern and connection
only from afar, or can we look for it in
situ?

My
role in Theresa May’s economy may well become more marginalised as the teeth of
Brexit begin to sharpen. I hope that this will not become the case – that writing,
the arts and academic research and curation remain valued as means of interrogating,
exposing and challenging Who We Are And Why We’re Here (And Not There) – but,
in a system clinging not by the fingers but I suspect only the fingernails, to
the thermodynamically limited idea of perpetual economic growth, people who
walk around cities at 3 in the afternoon and don’t even stop to buy a bloody
coffee you cheeky git are likely to become ostracised and pushed to the
margins. Or, so the case might go in one of Peter Frase’s Four Futures.

When,
on my walk this afternoon, I reached the point where the Shropshire Union Canal
expels into the Dee, and turned onto it to begin my home stretch, I was shocked
not by the sheer physicality of the new student flats, which have been under
construction for around a year, but by the massive marketing slogan draped over
their nearly-finished outline.

‘THE
TOWPATH: LOVE YOUR UNI YEARS’, beamed the marketing guff, in stark white on
red. The word ‘fresh’ appears somewhat arbitrarily (one assumes a newly-built
flat would not be stale) and there is of course direction to the adjacent
marketing suite. Told to love (or do) anything, we tend to question the
motivation and instruction. As it happens, I did and do love my uni years. I’m
still in them, after all, but how should I feel – and here I am imagining that
these flats were completed in the early part of 2006, on one of my visits to an
open day at Chester – about being sold rhetoric which implores me to ‘love’ my
uni years? Are not the years already slipping by before I have had time to
consciously enjoy them?

For
those not familiar with the site, let me briefly explain a) the controversy and
b) the personal significance. The controversy is the same to be found in any
university city: namely, a town and gown tension, exemplified by a burgeoning
Higher Education sector; the ‘intrusion’ or ‘studentification’ of city spaces
(usually but not always on the peripheries) at the expense of local and
long-term residents; and the collusion of a private sector set to profit monumentally
from often shoddily assembled buildings which will perpetually be rented to transitory
residents, for short-term gains over a long-term timescale. Liverpool has these
problems, Newcastle has these problems, Cambridge has these problems. It also
has the benefits and, in a city like Chester, these are often overlooked. Before
the early 2000s, there probably wasn’t what we would today describe as a ‘brain-drain’
in Chester, but certainly the University was far less developed (it was still a
college of Liverpool, for a start) and places like Manchester, Leeds and
Birmingham were probably much more appealing to the would-be student. I have
nothing other than lived experience and anecdotal evidence on which to stake my
claims, but take it as a fairly sound (if biased) thing of me to say that the
University being here has made this a far better place to live.

You
will have noticed that the b) personal significance of The Towpath development
was implied towards the end of my last paragraph, but let me tell a short
anecdote to add context. On the bottom right of that picture is the beer garden
and part of the building of my favourite bar in probably the world or at least
the city of Chester: Telford’s Warehouse. Named in honour of the
Shropshire-born industrial pioneer responsible for much Great and Good work on
the UK canal network in the 19th Century, the pub has been a staple
part of my social and personal life for around a decade. About two hundred
yards from where this photo was taken, on Whipcord Lane, my partner lived for
three years as an undergraduate, and we would regularly take a short walk from
the terraced house she shared along the canal to Telford’s, to sip pints of
bitter and listen to people strum acoustic guitars (and, on one memorable
occasion, a fifty-piece orchestra) at the bar’s still-going-strong open-mic
night. This is the place I took my family for sandwiches and beer before and
after graduation and it is the place where I have vomited after doing too many
tequila slammers and the place where I have had foosball tournaments and
planned the future and drank to absent friends and made new ones. One of my
mates from home even once drove from Newcastle, to Chester, on a whim because
there was especially pleasant guest ale on.

Now,
you assume that I will tell you what has become synonymous with so many of
these stories of gentrification: that the bar is under threat. In fact, no:
actually, the opposite is true. Purchased outright by the owners this year,
Telford’s, should it choose to embrace them and offer student deals while
keeping true to its roots as a community pub for residents of the Garden
Quarter, stands to be the new local of a several-hundred-strong army of
freshers. People like me, ten years ago, and ten years later.

The
way water courses rise and fall, whether over days or centuries, in line with
tidal pull, pollution and other environmental and human-based factors, has
always fascinated me. Strolling beside the Dee and the Shropshire Union canal
today, I had in mind the thought that my connection to this place would seem to
be ebbing. With no ‘work’ here and no other reason to stay than my partner’s
job, it might be the case that, just as in 2010, we soon leave this walled
city, with its views over to Wales. There is beauty here: of a traditionally
British kind, yes – all Tudor buildings, lazy river cruises with high tea and
compact cathedrals – and it is probably a beauty borne of historical,
geographic and cultural happenstance. It is different to what I know
intimately, in the North-East, and I don’t sit in places like Telford’s
anywhere near as often as I ought anymore, but the student flats opposite are I
think tied into that: they speak of a new generation of incomers (and some
locals): people who will be paying a huge deal more than me, to study and live
here, and who, maybe, might be from other riversides, and who might, in 2026,
walk down by the Dee and think about what has flown away, passed on; and also
what has remained, silted and shored up, safe, secure, permanent.

Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Dark Mountain: Uncivilised Poetics is out now, including
my essay, ‘What Kingdom Without Common Feasting?’ based on the work of the late
County Durham poet, William Martin. The blurb
at the back of the book poses a simple but (should-be) shocking abstract:

‘We are living through
an age of turmoil: climate change, extinction, failed economics, stagnant
politics. In such testing times, what’s the point of poetry? Uncivilised Poetics brings together a
unique gathering of writers and artists to tackle this question.’

Since its
inception in 2009, The Dark Mountain Project has been a steady stream of water
in a drying world. Bold, confrontational, thought-provoking, the editors have
never shied away from destabilising literature, artworks and commentary
designed to force our eye on a changing world. Six years ago, many of the
issues they raised – across their website, at their events and in their books
and other publications – felt very much on the fringe. Pre-Trump, Pre-Brexit,
pre-alarming climate change projections, these things felt incompatible. Now,
in an ‘alt-right’, ‘post-truth’, ubiquitous-smartphone-use, hello-the-new-normal
world, their work feels, well, compatible, urgent.

The
current volume alone, despite a steep price tag (you’ll appreciate why when you
get your mitts on it: it’s big and it’s beautiful), is worth purchasing just
for poems, essays, artworks and spoken word recordings from contributors like
Vahni Capildeo, John Kinsella, Nancy Campbell, Robert Montgomery, Harriet
Fraser, Mark-bloody-Rylance(!) and many, many others.

I urge
you to invest the money in a copy. Switch off your phone and computer, kill
this blog, make a pot of tea, and be absorbed in this staggering anthology.

Sunday, 23 October 2016

Just had one
of those weeks where you barely have time – in a metaphorical sense – to
breathe. Sometimes, of course, it’s good to be aware of your breath: think
mindfulness—a conscious drawing-to the mind the drawing-in of breath. Conversely,
it’s often good to know, implicitly, that your lungs will continue taking in
air, and your heart will continue pumping blood, and you’ll live and be able to
crack on with commuting, working, eating and so forth.

What I’m
saying is, a mad-busy (hectic, frenzied &c) week has come to an end and I
can finally breathe in through nose, allow thoughts to compost, exhale through
mouth.

Compost

noun

1.

A mixture
of various decaying organic substances, as dead leaves or manure, used for
fertilising soil.

I like
the notion of old thoughts fertilising new ones. Tired words becoming fresh ones.
Shabby situations being reinvigorated.

Yet, here
we are, busy people: avoiding too-personal glances and garlic breath on the
8.07 Metro; thinking about work even on Saturday evening; wondering – wonder-ing
– where the time goes/has gone.

Where was
I? Yes. Sunday afternoon, catching up. I’m thinking in metaphors, you see, as I
spent two days last week with a roomful of academics, thinking about, taking
part in, and talking about critiquing my own and others’ doctoral work.

How are
my words (spoken, written, ‘performed’) different in differing arenas? How do I
talk at Gateshead’s Trinity Square, in public (“Gatesheed”) as opposed to in the semi-public-semi-private confines of an
academic conference? (“Gateshead”). To what extent is “Gatesheed” – double-‘e’
as opposed to ‘ea’ – a ‘performance’, both by me, when I accent it, and by the
residents of Gateshead, when they choose to accent it? Is there an argument –
semantic, topographic, linguistic – for ‘heed’ sounding more appropriate than ‘head’?

These are
the questions I ask myself, walking around wondering at the anachronistic
public art sculpture, ‘Halo’, which appears to have crashed to earth in the
exact place to frame fantastic selfies of Nando’s and Vue Cinema. How are our public
spaces and thoroughfares managed to capture and maximise opportunities for
advertising and sale; and conversely, how do those guided spaces, narrated in a
top-down fashion to us, speak to – or mute – our dwindling public discourse?

'Halo' by Stephen Newby (2014) at Trinity Square, Gateshead

There is
a line of thought – and I can’t remember to whom I should attribute this, but
it is definitely not my idea – which proposes that the Halo belongs to the
Angel (Of The North), and has ‘blown away’, presumably to land symbolically at
Trinity Square for its significance as the site – a site: I don’t know the loco-significance of ‘Trinity’ to this
part of the ’heed – of the three-pointed godhead. Gates-head. Goats-head.
God-head. I don’t know. I div-not-knaa. Nee idea.

We must
think about these things.

Meanwhile,
in South Shields... The Word: National Centre for the Written Word (AKA South
Shields Central Library, AKA “waste of taxpayers’ cash”, AKA “do the coonsil
not reelize that books are aall gan online noo aneeway like”) has just had its
opening. I went down on Saturday afternoon and was hugely impressed. My online
interactions in the curious pseudo-third space that we think of as Facebook,
had impressed on my mind a feeling that few of my fellow Sanddancers would make
the effort to visit. Facetious comments on the Shields Gazette Facebook page aside, it was reassuring to note
several hundred people in the building, already making use of the wide range of
facilities, services and space.

‘Space’ is
an interesting word to dwell upon. I suppose we can think across many tangents
here, but I want to consider the space that a public library is, opens and
affords us. ‘Affords’ is another interesting word, and ordinarily I would right
click and select a synonym, but I think it doubly interesting that, in my quick-fire
descriptive act of typing, I reached subconsciously for a word loaded with
economic connotations. How is my mind a product of finance capitalism? How are
these spaces – be they privately or publically funded(!) – spaces in which we
can question or critique the logic of semantics, financialisation and consumer
normativity?

When
Hebburn’s new library received a RIBA nomination, commentators on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle Facebook
page referred to it as “just a box”. Quite aside from disagreeing with architecture
experts (for who needs those?), the insinuation was clear: unless the box in
question is a profit-generating one, why should we tolerate it?

The Word, South Shields

Similar,
disparaging comments about The Word can be found in abundance online and in
general discourse right now. Go into The Wouldhave, South Shields’s Wetherspoon’s,
and I guarantee people will tell you that it’s a colossal waste of money. They
will repeatedly say, “Aye, but books are going digital now, why do we need more paper?” They will tell you that
the council are backward-looking; that the building is “an eyesore”; and that
what we really need, frankly, are more shops. “Why waste the money on this when
we need affordable housing?!”

Are you
aware that we are being directed into binary modes of thought? Can we tolerate
new (social and private) housing stock simultaneously to a new library? Do you
want Pepsi or Coke, Madam?

None of
these comments are necessarily wrong. They may be foolhardy, or they may be
made by the types of people to whom the transformative power of libraries – and
books and the written and spoken word more generally – were never made available
or encouraged; and South Shields probably does need more decent shops to stimulate
footfall, but I refute, with every fibre of my being, the claim that this
building was/is a waste of money.

Without
even touching on the facilities, the resources (computers, WiFi, 3-D printers,
as well as, no doubt, every hardback edition Catherine Cookson ever published)
or the spectacular views from the top floor, I feel the need to say this as unambiguously
as I can: South Shields’s new library is amazing and if the people of the town
slander it without first going in, more fool them.

South
Shield’s ‘old’ library will now ‘become’, presumably via a process of exacting
retrofitting scrutinised by Her Majesty’s drones, the new Job Centre for the
town. In the place of the current job centre, a cinema will be built. Whether
this will receive council support is not for me to say or know, but one way or
another, the regeneration of this part of Shields continues apace, and I wonder
– while fully supporting The Word, with all of my vested interests – how north-west
South Shields, around Harton Staithes, will look and feel in years to come. If,
as in Gateshead, Vue (or Cineworld, Odeon or any other big, commercial
multiplex) secures the contract, we can assume that Pizza Express et al will
swiftly follow; and if this does happen, we can safely assume the ongoing
corporate homogeneity of this enclave of North-East England.

View from inside The Word

These
things are complex, which is why we must talk about them. But first we must
find the right language, vernacular, tone.

Wednesday, 3 August 2016

PhDs skew
your sense of time. I have alluded to the oddness of the academic year – as opposed
to the calendar or financial year – before, and perhaps, as Jay Griffiths notes
in her marvellous book, Pip, Pip: A
Sideways Look at Time, all of these constructs of time are wedded
ineffectually to modernity’s idea of a grand, linear narrative, wherein we
progress in one direction through space-time. In any case, I have completed the
first ‘year’ of my PhD, but in reality, despite having (successfully!) passed
my Stage One APR (for those not in the know, this is basically the same as a
probationary APR in a job: a semi-formal meeting in which you show evidence of
how well you think you’re doing, and a panel either corroborates that or tears
you to shreds) I have actually been working on it for just over ten months.

Great book, highly recommended

Ten
months, twelve. Meh, this feels like a good time to reflect on where I’m at and
where I might be this time next year, at the end of Stage Two (Oh, God). I
started work on this project with a suite of poems based around the Stringing
Bedes walks I co-led last year. Those poems’ early drafts were aired in the –
largely – run-down church halls of South Tyneside, often to one man and his
dog, and later reworked in meetings with Bill, Alex and Paul, and after
(largely positive) scrutiny in my APR by Jake Polley and Margaret Wilkinson, so
they feel like the most ‘complete’ of the thirty or so poems I have written so
far.

A number
of the poems I have written in the first year have gone on to be what I would
term ‘linchpins’: poems that will hopefully be key, thematic concerns of the collection.
One of these was ‘Each Pebble its Part’, which I wrote in collaboration for the
Northern Landscapes exhibition which aired during the Newcastle Poetry Festival
in May. Ostensibly a response to Bunting, the reason I think the poem was so
important is that it allowed me the freedom to say, ‘Look, Basil, while I bloody
love Briggflatts, your idea of what
the North is is very different to mine.’ That poem was published fifty years
ago. Half a century might not mean a lot, hundreds of years later, when critics
are surveying a particular poetic tradition or movement, and I certainly wouldn’t
be egotistical enough to suggest that anybody will be reading my poems in 2216,
but writing Each Pebble... felt pivotal in that I became at ease putting enough
distance between myself and Bunting to say that, while my work is indebted to
yours in many ways, it is also very different.

Of
course, the problem with saying a poem is a linchpin is by association it
suggests that the others aren’t as strong. While it’s true that there are poems
I have written that won’t make it into my final submission, never mind the manuscript
for the collection, these poems are perhaps as important linchpins in their own
right, for on reflection, they reveal where the writing shouldn’t be going, or
where it’s failing, as much as where it is succeeding and making important and
fresh statements.

Come to this, please.

I opened
this post referring to time, and that is certainly something that is threading
through the work already. In a supervisory meeting a while back, I was advised
to look into the history of South Tyneside more; that perhaps in honing down
from a fairly large geographical area (the North-East) to a smaller one, I
might be able to say more succinctly what I want to say about being from this
place. All of this was working, until the 23rd June, when
you-know-what happened.

Like many
poets and writers I know, I wrote a few things in the immediate aftermath of
Brexit, one or two might still have legs in six month’s time. But it’s very difficult
to write about such a pressing issue when it’s so fresh and so much is being
pumped out about it. The annoying thing is that not writing about it feels just
as bad, but I do wonder whether biding time might prove to be a more useful
strategy.

Two other
poems set outside of the region (Bell-end alert: one of them took second place in a prize...) also now feel like important moments not only in the collection,
but I suppose in my thinking overall about my wankily-titled thesis and its
claims to belonging and palimpsests and whatever else it claims (I do actually
know what I’m doing. Honest). I don’t know if there’s a yardstick of time after
which it’s OK to write about a place, but in my case it has certainly taken a
full ten years to write poems about Chester and the surrounding area. Actually,
both of the poems I refer to, along with at least one more currently in draft,
are set in North Wales, and are predominantly concerned with the ‘elsewhere’.
These are poems that attempt to counter the collection’s central impetus (that
the North-East is the be-all-and-end-all); to unearth its anchor and perhaps
show that maybe, just maybe, the sand it was wedged into wasn’t so secure to
begin with. They are poems about the place-that-is-not-a-home-but-could-become-one-if-only-it-wasn’t-so-weird-and-oh-yeah-I-forgot-about-the-economics-of-home-and-in-truth-the-original-home-is-weird-and-oh-Christ-curveball!

All of
that is pretty cryptic, isn’t it? Back to time: in the poetry world, things
tick along at a glacial pace (or not, as terrifying recent news about the rapidly-warmingclimate shows), with poems often not appearing in journals for at least a year
after they’re finished, and many more years in pamphlets or collections after
that. So, yeah, maybe check back in 2020?

Monday, 27 June 2016

Honestly, what the Hell is going on? I won't post anything else until Ms Lewell-Buck's promised statement, but my Christ...Original post of 27/06/2016 follows:I have lived in important places,
timesWhen great events were decided; who ownedThat half aroodof rock, a no-man’s landSurrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seenStep the plot defying blue cast-steel –‘Here is the march along these iron stones’That was the year of theMunichbother. WhichWas more important? I inclinedTo lose my faith in Ballyrush and GortinTill Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.He said: I made theIliad from suchA local row. Gods make their own importance.

‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh

At 7am on
Friday morning last week, one hour ahead of Greenwich Meantime, I woke up in
Venice, Italy, to prepare to take a flight back to Manchester. I had spent the
previous five days, with my girlfriend, Kate, enjoying our first visit to one
of Europe’s most well-known and well-loved cities. As we double-checked our
passports and boarding cards, made sure nothing had accidentally slipped under
the bed or been left in the wardrobe, we took the final opportunity to access
free WiFi before we returned home, and were gutted to learn the breaking news
that our country had decided, in the dead of night while we had been asleep, to
exit the European Union.

We
arrived at Marco Polo airport – a place far too small, hot and stuffy for the
volume of tourists that utilise it – to an Italian news broadcast of David
Cameron’s resignation. This was at around 9am, British time, and despite being
unable to decipher the majority of the content, it was evident that in less
than half a day, our county had begun to fall apart. This was a very different
place to the one we had left on the 19th June, and we knew that the
shit was only just beginning to hit the fan.

Venice, the city that gave us the great European traveller and internationalist, Marco Polo, when skies were bluer.

Fast
forward a few days, to the Monday morning hangover after the extended weekend
binge, and it’s clear that little, if anything, of what I have said in the
preceding paragraph is hyperbolic. The Conservative Party has lost its cowardly
leader and seems hell-bent on squabbling its way to ensuring that either Buffoon
Borris or Anyone-But takes residency at Number 10 in the Autumn. Quite who this
will be is, at this stage, anyone’s guess; but it is more probable that Tim
Peake will discover rocking horses’ shit on the moon than it is that that
person will actually deliver any of the so-promised money to those so-deserving
public services.

For those
whose research in the lead-up to the referendum constituted more than reading
the Daily Express for five minutes in
the queue at the barbers, it was abundantly evident that just because a few
rich, white men plastered a tantalising figure on a big, fuck-off red bus, didn’t
ever mean it was actually going to happen.

Alas, of
course, this has led to the usual social media eruptions: both the justified
and the childlike shit-slinging expected around these kinds of momentous
events. All sorts of bollocks has been spouted on the blue-tops – I don’t
really need to tell you much more about that – but it does bear repeating that ‘we’
Leavers are absolutely justified to Remain angry, upset and confused; that
calling a Leaver ‘thick’ is not only condescending, it is deeply unhelpful; and
that, above all else, we must, absolutely must,
embrace the result, like the Weekend Warriors many of us are, and take our Resolve,
firmly.

When the Vaporetto, the water taxi, I was aboard
on Friday morning sailed away from the island of Venice into the open waters,
its delightful spires and canals receding into the distance behind me, entering
the choppy, tidal waters beyond felt massively symbolic and, well, frightening.
I am shit-scared of what this vote will mean, in the short, medium and
long-terms.

As we all
did last Friday, I checked how my constituencies voted. The plural here is
important, as I’m sure it is for many thousands of other people like myself who
divide their time between at least two significant poles. In Cheshire West and
Chester, where I voted at the last General Election and where I am ostensibly ‘resident’,
a very narrow proportion – 50.68% – opted for the Leave vote. Chester is of
course associated with WAGs, the Cheshire Set, the Duke of Westminster and
being the prime shopping destination in the North-West, amongst other things.
Put simply: it has money, and its Land Rovers and blinged-up residents puking
Prosecco into the streets on Race Day aren’t afraid to show it.

But a
mile or two south-east of the rapidly-expanding University, of which I am an
alumnus of two degrees, lies the suburb of Blacon. Bordering the north-east
Wales county of Flintshire (Leave: 56.37%), this large and often-forgotten
enclave of Cheshire, commonly regarded if not factually then anecdotally as the
most affluent county outside the Home Counties, was once the largest council
estate in Europe. When I worked as a Volunteer Co-ordinator at the University
of Chester from 2013 to 2015, I would always encourage my students to take up
voluntary opportunities in Blacon: not out of some kind of Victorian act of
philanthropy, but to help them see that, as they made their way to the city’s nightclubs
on a Wednesday night for three years, just a few miles down the road to their
glitzy new halls of residence were people whose very lives often depended on
the generosity and support of social enterprises like the Blacon Community
Trust. Ealier this year, BCT went into liquidation – a shocking indictment of
the divide between the haves and the have-nots in this part of the country –
but it’s okay because the Big Society is alive and well and we’re going to be
stronger, more prosperous, and more in control outside of the devils of Europe
with all of their shackles on our freedoms.

The Groyne Lighthouse, South Shields: blasting off to God-knows where

Despite
all of my affiliations to this part of the country, I was naturally more eager
to find out how South Tyneside had voted. A lot, and I really do mean a fuck load, of the conversations I had
had in the months leading up to the vote in places in South Tyneside had
centred around a bluntness which pointedly said ‘Out.’ I am all for a person
consulting a number of sources, doing independent research and coming to a
reasoned decision which is contrary to my own. However, what struck, and
continues to strike me, is the simplistic conviction with which some people in Shields told – tell – me,
forcibly and staunchly, ‘Out.’ A good proportion of this flat, monosyllabic invocation
is followed by the clichés: ‘We can’t take any more’; ‘What have the government
done for us, though?’; ‘Why should they,
in Brussels, dictate our laws?’

A
compelling argument by John Tomaney, Professor of urban and regional planning
at University College London, which was published online last week by the Northern Correspondent, questions the
usefulness of referendums. Tomaney says:

“Referendums
come with problems. How can complex constitutional questions be reduced to
simple “Yes” or “No” answers? Can citizens reasonably be expected to grasp
arcane technical details? Citizens may end up voting on matters other than at
hand, perhaps to punish the sitting government.”

In South Tyneside, as in vast swathes of other areas of the
UK (notably, those once-stable areas of industrial prosperity), the electorate
have done just that: punished the sitting government. This has been a protest
vote attached to no real protest; a rock hurled through a window with the
hurler unaware of the address of the building or what the rock might subsequently
damage when it’s smashed through the glass.

As a writer whose current (and likely future) practice is
fundamentally concerned with trying to capture, via poetry, some sense of the
zeitgeist (as well as the history and heritage) of South Tyneside and the wider
North-East region, it is distressing to hear of places like Hartlepool, where
69.6% of people flicked the collective Vs.

Writers need to make money, so it is not cynical of me, but
simply astute, to have vested interests in the impending opening of two new
libraries/arts and cultural centres: The Word in South Shields and Storyhouse
in Chester. As a citizen, this perhaps jars: my library(ies) should be free places
of civic accessibility, in which critical debate, open dialogue, research and creativity
are fostered.

In spite of its recent nomination as one of the UK’s best buildings at the 2016 RIBA awards, local feeling, at least on our good friend
Facebook, towards Hebburn’s new £11m library is antipathetic, speaking of a
wider local, regional, national and international malaise towards any “box”
which does not generate revenue.

Hebburn Central Library: just a box?

How many local authorities do you know that have built not
one, but two new libraries and a new
swimming pool, amidst the longest, deepest period of economic uncertainty in
post-war Britain? South Tyneside Council, when they open The Word later this
year, will have done just that: proven investment, despite central government funding
cuts, to both the educational and health and wellbeing developments of its
residents, has provided facilities which local people do little but moan about,
while rates of obesity soar and anti-intellectualism proliferates at a time
when intellectualism is most needed.

I am not saying that a library or a swimming pool is a magic
bullet: South Tyneside’s problems transcend both of those things; with roots of
inequality stemming back to at least the 1970s. Nor do I think everything they
do is wise: the car parking charges, frankly, are ridiculous and should be
revoked instantly. At risk of sounding like a serial Shields Gazette angry-man-letter-writer, who, realistically, will
pay to park in South Shields town centre to go shopping when there are no shops
worth spending money in?

Haven Point swimming baths, South Shields

All of this brings me back to the referendum, with a sense of
empathy for those who decided to vote differently to myself. When your
once-thriving high street (King Street, South Shields – seriously: not the kind
of welcome you want to a town) is little more than a chain of Greggs bakeries
and Clinton’s Cards (here y’are, pet: have a cheese pasty and some mushy
sentiment to make you feel better about yasel); when your homes are
unaffordable or your streets tired and dirty; when you see crime and drugs and
are affected by them; when your industry has long-gone, along with it your area’s
binding sense of purpose; and all you’re left with is a zero-hours contract in
a call centre, it’s not a surprise you will use your one big chance to yell a
massive “fuck you very much” to the people in charge, half of whom probably couldn’t
point to South Shields on a map.

If you want the bite-size video version of the utter
disparity between the everyday person in South Shields and those people who
claim to represent them from hundreds of miles away, look no further than this
clip of arch-Tory, Jacob Rees-Mogg, canvassing in South Shields before last
year’s General Election. I don’t know JR-M; I’m sure he’s a decent enough bloke
and I don’t want to single him or anybody else out, but is it – honestly,
genuinely – a surprise that people are at best reacting by voting to leave the
EU, often with little to no understanding of what that means, and at worst
turning to UKIP and even more scary factions of the far-right in order to vent
their decades-long and largely legitimate frustrations?

A few libraries and leisure facilities aren’t going to get us
out of this mess. Long blog posts by privileged people like me aren’t going to
get us out of this mess. And, I feel I have to say it: a second referendum is
not going to get us out of this mess. Democracy, like it or not, must be
respected. If a second referendum were to be held (and the idealistic, opportunistic
part of my brain says maybe, just maybe we can do all of this again in a month’s
time and get a different outcome) there would be blood on the streets which
would make the riots of 2012 look tame.

The fact is, we are now in the deep throes of that Monday
morning hangover. This country, this England that I live in and am from, which
was part of a ‘United Kingdom’ and a ‘Great Britain’ (though those labels will
surely become as redundant as Hameron in the years ahead) is now, to quote
Yeats, “changed, changed utterly”. Where we go now, how we adapt, what even
happens for the rest of this year, is entirely up for grabs. It will be both
fascinating and terrifying to watch and be a part of.

As a primer, as something to do to feel productive, to not just whine on Facebook, I have
written a letter, copied openly below, to South Shields MP, Emma Lewell-Buck. I
suspect that this referendum, which it goes without saying will be studied in
history lessons by our children and grandchildren, has not only fractured this
country permanently, it has become the catalyst for whatever prevailing order
comes next and arises, Phoenix-like, from the ashes. The choices are never
straightforward or binary, but it seems to me that, as individuals,
constituents, workers, artists, dreamers, worriers and citizens of this
country, we can continue fighting with each other and playing into the hands of
the far-right, or we can seize this as an opportunity: to think about where we
really want our country to be, both as the ‘independent’ nation it must
necessarily now become, but as a small island on the outskirts of a changed
Europe. I see democracy, social and environmental justice, and opportunity and fulfilment
for all; it’s just right now, I see it through the billowing smoke of the
burned-out husk that was, once, my united kingdom.

Dear
Emma,

I am
writing to you as a born-and-bred Sanddancer, a 2015 General Election Labour
voter, and most of all, as a concerned citizen of this country.

At the referendum
last week, I voted to remain in the European Union. I was, as I’m sure you were,
shocked and saddened to learn that 62% of people in South Tyneside had chosen
the opposite of me. The country now feels like a diminished and divided place: many
of my family members and closest friends are gravely worried about its future
as a result of this disruptive campaign and its already-apparent fallout.

A
confession: though born in and from South Shields (and regularly back in the
area to visit friends and family and attend meetings at Newcastle University,
where I am enrolled as a postgraduate student) I currently live in Chester,
having first moved nearly a decade ago to pursue my undergraduate degree,
broaden my horizons and see a different part of the country.

Despite my
current status as a non-South Shields resident, I retain immensely important
familial and professional ties to the town and wider borough and region. I hope
that will not dissuade you from answering two of the questions I have which
stem from my anxieties about how South Shields moves forward in the future,
given the current national context.

1.Last summer, I paid £3
to elect Jeremy Corbyn as the party’s leader. I have not since committed any
further – to joining the party – having been put off by the in-fighting and
lack of stability that I have perceived in the past days, weeks and months. Do
you support Jeremy Corbyn to remain your party’s leader, and if not, why not?

2.Why do many of the
people I speak to in South Shields tell me that the Labour Party is “out of
touch” with the “ordinary, working person” of the town?

Emma, I
am gravely alarmed that the 62% Leave vote in South Tyneside is just the
beginning of bitter, spiteful resentment that may yet manifest in much more
ugly terms. How do you propose to convince me to join the party and work with
you, and/or your colleagues elsewhere in the UK, to unite and strive for a
fairer society when it appears that your party is in absolute disarray?

I am
immensely proud to be from South Shields; to be writing about it for my PhD
thesis; to be involved in arts projects based in the town and the region; and
to regularly visit my family, who are, and always have been, here. But I am
worried that my fellow Sanddancers are rapidly losing faith in you and the
wider Labour movement: I fear that this may drive them further to the right,
into the arms of despicable ‘politicians’ like Nigel Farage, with his corrosive
message.

Please,
let me know what you intend to do to heal some of the evidently-gaping wounds
that our hometown, and the wider country, is so divided over right now. I
imagine that you may well direct me to my own MP, Chris Matheson in Chester,
but the reason I am writing to you is that I am much more intimately connected
to South Shields. To paraphrase the Birmingham poet, Roy Fisher, Shields is
“what I think with”.

South
Shields is somewhere I always enjoy returning to: for its stunning coastline,
its delicious food, its arts and entertainment, its sport, and above all for
the ‘craic’ of its friendly, multicultural population. But right now, when the
majority of the people in the town appear
to stand against the values I hold dear in a European identity, with all of its
associated advantages, I’ve never felt more ambivalent about the place I still,
despite everything, call home.